Below is live coverage of the Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win! panel from the SMX Advanced conference.
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2:28:58 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Q&A Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance (@keyrelevance)
Speakers:
Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman)
Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)
Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)
2:32:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Starting in a min
2:36:26 PM Barry Schwartz: Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman) is up first
2:39:19 PM Barry Schwartz: Site Speed is your Silver Bullet
2:40:03 PM Barry Schwartz: Note: To get to the silver bullet, we had to talk about werewolves, love, feelings and body building. Long story.
2:40:17 PM Barry Schwartz: Site performance, is the one thing that makes everything better. Conversion to rankings
2:40:51 PM Barry Schwartz: Google uses speed as an organic search ranking factor for the top 1% of competitive queries (is that true?)
2:41:16 PM Barry Schwartz: Um, I think he confused it, see http://searchengineland.com/google-1-of-searches-affected-by-site-speed-ranking-factors-97570
2:41:35 PM Barry Schwartz: 40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
2:42:05 PM Barry Schwartz: The average fortune 500 company has a site that takes 7 seconds to load
2:42:17 PM Barry Schwartz: For every one second of load time, conversion drops by 7%
2:42:33 PM Barry Schwartz: For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%
2:42:58 PM Barry Schwartz: A faster site reduces the cost of infrastructure and releases by 50% or more
2:44:05 PM Barry Schwartz: This goes back to the werewolves thing
2:44:34 PM Barry Schwartz: 5 Key Steps for optimizing performance:
2:45:03 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Learn: Google and Yahoo have great resources on this
2:45:31 PM Barry Schwartz: Also stevesounders.com wrote the book on this
2:45:50 PM Barry Schwartz: Firebug, webpagetest, google analytics, google page speed, yahoo yslow are free tools
2:46:29 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Do caching
2:47:20 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Don't dupleicate JavaScript, remove unused CSS
2:48:21 PM Barry Schwartz: Use < link > your css and avoid @import
2:48:46 PM Barry Schwartz: (3) ...
2:48:52 PM Barry Schwartz: (4) Avoid redirects
2:50:32 PM Barry Schwartz: (5) CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests (it is one big image, with individual images within the big image
2:51:52 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Best Practices when doing sprites:
- Images load together
- Images have similar color palettes
- Images are PNGS or GIFS
- Images are both small and cachable
2:52:51 PM Barry Schwartz: It was a 60 frame animated all as a CSS sprite
2:52:58 PM Barry Schwartz: Results:
2:53:13 PM Barry Schwartz: 50% decrease in amount of time for Google to crawl a single page
2:53:27 PM Barry Schwartz: 100% increase in amount of crawling done by GoogleBot
2:53:46 PM Barry Schwartz: 1.5 seconds saved per page view per customer (saving customers 22 years of time)
2:54:18 PM Barry Schwartz: Site performance is not just about SEO it is about customer UX
2:57:08 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Next up Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)
2:58:02 PM Barry Schwartz: Some of the site speed they have done was perceived speed improvements... Kinda like "tricks" he said.
2:58:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Back when he was at Yahoo and other search engines they looked at the value of each link, load time, how much it cost, ROI, etc
2:59:17 PM Barry Schwartz: What tools do you need to measure?
2:59:33 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) A/B Testing tool like Optimizely
3:01:13 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Page Speed Tools
3:01:32 PM Barry Schwartz: (3) Eye Tracking, User Attention, Clicks & Scroll tools
3:01:50 PM Barry Schwartz: CrazyEgg
3:02:09 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Be agressive with the first test to gauge the level of potential lift
3:03:39 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Assign each link (including social buttons) a real or synthetic value to compare buckets
3:04:28 PM Barry Schwartz: How fast should your site be? Some people say it should be 2 seconds, some people compare it to competition, some people do the try your best or use site performance graders and go by their scores¿
3:04:41 PM Barry Schwartz: Tim said, take this test
3:05:38 PM Barry Schwartz: This is an under used metric but they used in search often... Throw back the header first to make the user feel it is fast
3:07:52 PM Barry Schwartz: Case Study: ShopAtHome.com
3:10:28 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Next up Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)
3:12:10 PM Barry Schwartz: His test is when he goes into a restaurant he asks for a glass of water and if he doesnt get it fast enough, he leaves - cause it will just be downhill from there
3:16:23 PM Barry Schwartz: Wow, that is fast for Dallas location
3:18:15 PM Barry Schwartz: He used CloudFlare CDN to speed up his site, that is the before and after
3:19:14 PM Barry Schwartz: Complain to your host and it might get faster
3:19:45 PM Barry Schwartz: Size of your code doesn't matter if it loads faster
3:20:09 PM Barry Schwartz: 6 times more code but loads slower
3:20:41 PM
Barry Schwartz:
CMS & Caching:
- It takes time to run server side scripts, cache the pages on the server
- Caching cuts response times
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3:22:15 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Web Video and Speed:
- Async video impacts page load speed very little
- Streaming large video files from the same server not a good idea
- Wistia is a good option he said
3:23:29 PM
Barry Schwartz:
Easy Speed Wins:
- Good Hosting
- Using CDN
- Simplify design
- Cache Plugins for CMS
- Appropriate Use of Async Content
3:25:25 PM Barry Schwartz: Q&A and then You&A With Matt Cutts in about 30 minutes from now...